GATES FOUNDATION COMES UP WITH A DEAL TO BRING OUT SCIENCE JOURNALS

Gates Foundation strikes deal to allow its researchers to publish in Science journals. An unusual and perhaps precedent-setting deal will enable researchers funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to comply with a foundation requirement that they publish their papers only in free, open-access (OA) journals, but still publish in the Science family of subscription journals, which typically keep content behind a paywall for a year.

Under the deal, announced yesterday, the foundation will award $100,000 to AAAS (publisher of Science Insider) to enable the publisher to make any paper by a Gates Foundation–funded researcher published in 2017 immediately available for free online. The deal covers Science and four sister subscription journals: Science Translational Medicine, Science Signaling, Science Immunology, and Science Robotics. (AAAS also publishes Science Advances, an OA journal.) The arrangement is provisional and will be revisited in 2018.

Last month, the Gates Foundation announced that it would not allow researchers it funded to publish in subscription journals; the move to put into action a policy the foundation initially announced in 2014. Specifically, the Gates Foundation wants its researchers to follow a publishing standard known as Gold OA. The Gates Foundation “is taking these steps because we want to advance the conversation around open access publishing and ultimately find new ways of accelerating impact and saving lives,” wrote Leigh Morgan, the Gates Foundation’s chief operating officer, on Medium yesterday. ( Full Report here: https://goo.gl/8VAXCg )